A co-varying collexeme analysis of Chinese classifiers kē and zhū
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The numeral classifier is a grammatical category in plenty of East Asian languages, with Chinese being one of the most widely reported. In Chinese, there are many classifiers that are near-synonymous, meaning that certain classifiers may be interchangeable in certain contexts. However, these classifiers are used with semantically similar nouns and, as a result, the distinction between the various usages is not always clear. In view of this issue, we propose to study near-synonymous classifiers using the co-varying collexeme method and the Euclidean distance, by exploring the case of the classifiers ? ke and ? zhu. We report results that not only partially confirm but also complement what has been found in previous raw-frequency-based research. |